Trying to make himself concentrate on how to get through, he recalled that a GI had gone down a tunnel, smelled another man coming toward him in the dark, and, rather than fire, had lain flat, “damn near melting into the earth,” his buddies had said. The VC had fired first, emptying an AK-47’s full thirty-round mag, its rounds whipping over the GI, no more than twenty feet away. The GI survived without a scratch, firing just once at the Kalashnikov’s flash, killing the VC. And he remembered how the tunnel rats who had survived said it had taken hours of painstaking work, probing gently every inch ahead with your knife for the little Russian-made “butterfly” mines that would blow your hand or foot off. And the kind of unbelievable pain in neck and elbows as you crawled ahead, the pain David Brentwood was starting to feel now. To reach the coast, where Freeman said the cave was, would take hours, and if the tunnel snaked, had security “double back” loops and sucker dead-end tributaries, it would take an eternity.
But then in the pitch-blackness of the stinking tunnel, David accepted the possibility that if Freeman was right that there was another sub, this tunnel might not be part of an underground complex like Cu Chi, which had held hundreds of fighters, living and working underground, with medical and kitchen antechambers, as well as weapons and ammunition storage. The man they called Mao didn’t live in the tunnel, after all. He lived in Port Angeles and used the tunnel solely as an underground supply road to the cave, an underground throughway to prevent their sub resupply line from being spotted by the infrared-equipped American satellites and UAVs such as Darkstar. The munitions, torpedoes, and mines could be stored deep in the cave, but food — even the American and Russian nuclear subs needed food supply — had been routinely transported in by Mao and his friends. And what better cover than a restaurant?
Had Freeman thought of this? he wondered. That if this was a supply tunnel, wouldn’t it be as straight as possible to the coast? And why bother booby-trapping it? The terrorists had dug the tunnel not as they had in Vietnam, as a conduit from which to attack American ground troops, but merely as a supply line. And why impede an escape route from the cave with dangerous booby traps?
The rushing of blood in David’s ears didn’t go away, but it subsided. He switched on the flashlight, and in that instant knew he was right.
Ahead, instead of narrowing, the tunnel widened to twice its width for about thirty feet, then dipped down and broadened into what seemed a holding area, about as big and high as a good-size delivery van. The dimensions of the excavation at once impressed and told him that in order to get rid of the dirt — always the tunneler’s big problem — the terrorists must have started digging from the sea cave, so they could pass the massive amounts of soil back and dump it into the ocean. That way, if seen from the air, it would have been attributable to the runoff of the 112-inches-a-year rainfall.
By the time David reached the “holding area,” his confidence was growing, and he sped up his pursuit of the escaping terrorists who Freeman hoped would lead them — via David’s sonar beeper — to a second lair.
Beyond the holding area, using his flashlight in quick on/off snatches, he saw flattened cardboard. The labeling in Japanese and Chinese told him nothing, but the manufacturers’ stamps, with their illustrated pictures of contents, indicated that the boxes had contained dried noodles, rice, and other such foodstuffs. He sat down, getting his breathing under control. He was so dehydrated from the strain, his initial freeze-up at the entrance to the tunnel, and the constant bent-over position required to negotiate the five-foot-high tunnel, that he wanted to gulp down all the water in his canteen. But warning himself not to drink too much, he rescrewed the cap and slid the canteen around his belt behind his back. Then he resumed his trek, walking slowly, moving his flashlight from side to side in rapid sweeps.
In fifteen minutes he had passed through what he estimated must have been a quarter mile of tunnel. This wasn’t a tunnel rat’s crawl, he thought, this was Nascar. He checked his beeper. It was working fine. He couldn’t stand up and his back was aching, but, his “dead” right hand notwithstanding, he was in reasonably good physical condition and anticipated that he would soon reach the cave or the branch-off that had to exist if Freeman’s theory of a second sub lair had any substance.
He heard a sound like a spit and the flashlight flew from his hand, flung somewhere behind him. He dropped to the floor and, through the IR glasses, saw a smudge of white — heat — in the tunnel, probably twenty feet away, and double tapped his compact’s trigger, the two rounds striking a human form that collapsed into an indistinguishable shape. He could hear someone moving, running, away. And then he was running too, the hunchbacked position slowing him more than he would have believed, the human diaphragm not built to sustain a sprinter long in such an unnatural position, the man fleeing from him obviously much shorter. Passing the stilled body, he saw it was a woman, her face no longer there. Two hundred feet farther he had to stop.
Sweat pouring off him, Choir Williams prodded Mao with the barrel of his HK, he, Freeman, and Aussie wearing full battle packs, not knowing what they might need if there was another sub lair, or what Freeman had begun calling a “branch plant” of the terrorists. They were close to the coast.
Aussie Lewis could hear the surf ahead. “We must be damn near the cave!” he said, looking over at Freeman.
The general heard him but refused to comment. Instead, he beckoned Mao with a gesture. “You led me on a wild goose chase, comrade,” he said. “This tunnel’s leading to the cave we already found. I told you what I’d do to Mommy, eh? Didn’t I?”
“I only know the cave tunnel,” said Mao. “We bring — we brought food to the cave. That is all. I swear. You kill my mother — you kill me — I can tell you no more. I only know this tunnel.”
Freeman believed him, and saw that Choir, red-faced with exertion, also believed him. He thrust his gloved finger hard in the direction of a thick treeline that Aussie felt certain marked the high cliff’s edge. “There’s a—” he began, and had to stop for breath, which made him more irritated. “—a goddamn sub nearby. I know it.”
“Permission, sir?” said Choir, a rarely used formality in the team.
“Go on,” the general said.
“There is a sub nearby, sir,” said Choir. “It’s at the bottom of the bay. We sank it.”
Below them, the damp of the tunnel was penetrating David Brentwood’s uniform, his perspiration chilled now that he’d stopped. Ahead in the quick sweep of his flashlight he saw a wall of rubble blocking the tunnel, no doubt the effects of the hydrofoil sapper unit’s demolition of the cave. Suddenly, David was revisited by the ghosts of panic, of losing his squad in Afghanistan, in another cave. And now he’d just shot a woman to death. And where had the other two terrorists gone? A side chamber? Behind him? He started back then stopped, heart thumping again. How many had died in the tunnels? Sealed off. The air was fetid in the darkness, and he could smell the disgusting odor of decomposing bodies, probably buried in the demolition of the cave.
Then, through his infrared goggles, David saw a smudge of heat leaking from the rubble. A moment later he saw a sudden white blossom, then a thwack! punched him off his feet. He was being fired at — two of them. The first bullet struck his vest low left, the second cracking above him as he lay flat on his back, IR goggles knocked askew, as he returned fire in the direction of the flash. There were no ricochets, which confirmed his marksmanship, his double-tap rounds obviously having passed through what he now realized must be a narrow cleft between the demolition rubble and the left side wall of the tunnel, his initial panic evicted by the sheer concentration required if he had any hope of getting out alive.